First off, the Henry Tudor Cat update!!! (grin) He's being a very, very, very good cat. Which has been true this entire time, of course. He's pretty sick of being treated, but still cooperates. And as far as I can tell (fingers crossed), he's NOT scratching at all, much less his eye. I sure hope it stays that way!

Marilyn and I didn't get in to the office until past 11:00 a.m., what with one thing and another (and Henry). That's okay. We did get a bunch of work done, even so.

In my case, I FINALLY was able to take the eNewsletter I'd created for the Grand Floral Walk (GFW) and make it work as HTML inside Outlook. It's a fairly nifty trick, I'm telling you!!! And, remarkably enough, it does NOT require any special software to do. At some point I need to teach others how to do it, but probably not this year. It's just too damn complicated for me to write out until I have more free time.

I also 'found' the permalink for one of our recent eNewsletters that our president, Frank, had wanted -- and that Carol had promised (???) to Executive board members. (Um, why would you DO THAT if you weren't sure you could provide it? I mean, Carol couldn't have come up with it on her own. And she hadn't discussed it with me when she told them she'd get it. Oh well. I guess it's a good thing I can figure this stuff out!)

We used to ALWAYS provide a permalink for our eNewsletters between 2008 and 2013. Amazingly enough, it's provided by our eNewsletter service, CoolerEmail -- and that's a pretty wonderful thing for them to do! Anyway, I worked on our templates (yet again) today, and added a place for the permalink to go.

We have a couple of options, actually. We can put the eNewsletter up at our website and link it there. I'd been having issues with that previously, but TODAY (in fact tonight -- just minutes ago!!!) I figured out how to make it work! That's a very big breakthrough, I'm telling you.

I reasoned it out while deciding I wanted a permalink for that GFW eNewsletter -- and because we're not sending it out via CoolerEmail, we needed another host.

I feel like something of a (very minor!) genius today, I have to tell you. I'm pretty convinced that even FISH wouldn't have had some of the answers to this stuff I got done. And happily I didn't have to ASK ANYBODY ELSE how to do it.

Sometimes I'm like a dog with a bone, seriously. Hahaha.

The work today was one thing, but Marilyn, Adeena and I took a day trip to the beach! We drove down the 'fast' way (which only takes around 90 minutes). The weather in Portland was WET today, and we did have rain on the drive. But it was dry in Seaside, believe it or not!

We did invite sister Sue to come along, but her leg was bothering her (from her fall of weeks ago), so she declined. I totally understand that. When you're sore, it's just not pleasant to take a long ride in a car!

We three stopped at the house and I actually changed into longer pants (I'd had on what I call my clam digger jeans, that go to just below the knee) and from sandals into boots. Just to stay warm enough.

We drove in and went to the Shilo Inn bar for food and a drink (introducing Adeena to Lemon Drops!). We love to go there, because it's right on the beach and the view is fabulous!!! (Marilyn had the waiter take a photo of us so she could text it to Jeff and tell him he should have been there with us!)

Gosh, we really like their food! We went there to celebrate back when we first got our house, by the way. Such a nice place.

After we ate we went over and played Fascination. Adeena had never played before! She and Marilyn both won several times -- and even I managed to win twice. We gave Adeena the tickets to start her collection. Someday she'll be able to get something nice with them. We need to trade some in, as we've got an awful lot now...

Then we went to the candy store and I bought some Sea Foam (which I adore and haven't had in ages!). I totally FORGOT to have Adeena try it (Marilyn is not a fan).

And finally we got ice cream, before heading back to Portland. We needed to get Adeena back before 7:30 and were actually in the parking lot of the festival office by 7:14 p.m.

Then Marilyn and I talked over the project she needed my help with -- the formation map for the Grand Floral Parade. I went upstairs to get started with that, and she was working on her many projects downstairs.

The cleaning guy was there as we were working. It's a bit distracting, but I suppose not as bad as when the staff is around (always needing things).

Henry came in at some point and is lying in his chair behind me. Colin, however, refuses to settle down. He keeps messing with things in my bathroom and making a bunch of noise. I guess he wants some attention. Colin, timing is everything! (smile)

Finally we both hit the wall and decided to come home...

It looks like I'll be staying home AGAIN this week. It's not like I can't get a TON of work done here.

First thing tomorrow morning I'll continue my work on that map. Marilyn needs to have it by afternoon for a meeting with Gary.

I have some website stuff I really need to get to! I can't believe I haven't done that, yet. And I should check in with Marissa and Katie on parade scripts, too...

And now I need to teach Kate how to code the permalink into the eNewsletters. Ideally I'd like to Remote in and watch her work on an eNewsletter, seeing as we had some coding issues last week again. I think I need to see what it is she does that messes up the code so I can help her avoid that. I guess it could be easy to cut pieces of code (???). It wasn't that hard to reason out last week. And Kate seems very eager to do the work without help (I get that). But it is my job to make sure these eNewsletters end up working the way we need them to.

Well, I guess it's time for bed, seeing as it's going on 2:00 a.m.

I still can't believe we got away for a few hours to the beach. How lovely! Yes, all three of us had a lot of work we could have been doing -- but sometimes a few hours of recreation and make all the difference, we find. And we're all willing to put in early and late (and long) hours to make up for it...